Logo
Log In

Key Laravel security features: high-level protection for websites

Blog image

Laravel is known to be a secure PHP framework for creating websites and applications. Those with a need for high levels of protection often choose Laravel. But why is security one of Laravel's advantages? Let’s learn the reason. We will review the key Laravel website security features that will help you keep your website and business safe.

First, why website security is important

  • it insures you against money losses
  • you and your customer's data is safe
  • your business reputation remains intact
  • you will not need emergency recoveries and cleanups
  • your website does not risk being blacklisted as harmful to users

Most prominent Laravel security features

Out-of-box, Laravel is good at sanitizing query data and protecting websites and applications from common risks. More details follow.

Protection in Laravel

  • Protection against SQL injection in Laravel

SQL Injection (SQLi) is a hacking technique where malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field and executed. This gives attackers control over the database. They can modify, disclose or delete the data — up to and including wiping the entire database. 

Laravel uses the Eloquent ORM (object-relational mapper) that does not allow malicious query data to pass through your forms. Due to PDO parameter binding, Eloquent ORM escapes these SQL commands and saves the invalid queries as text. 

This means your Laravel website is protected from SQL injections as long as you are using Eloquent ORM or Fluent Query Builder. This significantly improves security.

  • Protection against cross-site request forgery in Laravel

Attackers use cross-site request forgery (CSRF) to perform unwanted actions on the part of the authenticated user. Malicious requests are sent to the target site from another site that the user visits. The target website believes the forged requests to be legitimate ones coming from the logged-in user.

Laravel has CSRF protection enabled out-of-box. For this, it uses CSRF tokens. Tokens are generated on the form entry and compared against the ones saved in the user session. If there is no match, the request is not executed. 

  • Protection against cross-site scripting in Laravel

Cross-site scripting (XSS) allows attackers to inject malicious scripts into the content of trustworthy websites. These scripts travel with dynamic content to the user’s browser and are executed there. In this way, attackers take advantage of vulnerabilities in a website that a user visits.

Laravel prevents cross-site scripting because its syntax helps you automatically escape HTML objects that are passed via a view variable. XSS filter lets you remove the HTML tag from the input value.

  • Password protection in Laravel

One of the important Laravel security features is that passwords are not saved as plain text. They are hashed instead, which means transformed into a random string of characters unreadable by hackers. 

Unlike other forms of encryption, hashes are not designed to be decrypted with any keys. This is a “one-way” action. When a user enters a password again, its hash is verified against the one received previously. 

Laravel 5 provides secure hashing with Bcrypt and Argon2. For password hashing and verifying, the framework has Hash facade. 

Stay safe with Laravel!

This has been a brief rundown of the most important Laravel security features. Please remember that they are not a panacea for websites. There are plenty of additional security settings and measures that can be taken in accordance with your website’s needs. 

Feel free to entrust our web development company with any Laravel tasks. These may include security enhancements on your existing website or creating a new one from scratch.